Under the best of circumstances, you'd call it homey. A small church converted into a theater, it's lined with an assortment of sofas, love seats and benches arranged on risers to either side of the stage. The casual atmosphere and some excellent productions have made it an unlikely theater hot spot for the city's most promising young company. But on a recent late-March evening it's hard to see the success through the clutter.

The scenic elements for the upcoming show aren't exactly elegant: ceiling tiles that look a century old, a file cabinet with the top drawer bashed in, a pair of battered old desks piled with papers, grimy storefront windows. And the set still is a work in progress, so piles of lumber and equipment crowd the aisles.

Motoya Nakamura, The OregonianBrian Weaver watches while Kevin Jones rehearses. Directing Wilson, Weaver says, demands “attention to the size of the drama, the power of the language and the weight of history.” "One of the advantages of being a small theater is that you get to rehearse where you perform," says Brian Weaver, the company's artistic director. "You don't have to adjust from one space to another, and you get to feel the resonance of the room from the beginning. On the other hand, you have stepladders and table saws and dust everywhere."

Wilson's grand chronicle, play by play

The play "Radio Golf," which opens Saturday at Portland Playhouse, stands on its own but is best understood as part of August Wilson's decade-by-decade chronicle of the struggles and progress of African American life in the 20th century. Individually, the plays have won numerous awards and citations, including a best play Tony Award ("Fences"), and Pulitzer Prizes ("Fences" and "The Piano Lesson"). Taken together -- referred to alternately as "The Pittsburgh Cycle" or "The Century Cycle" -- they form a staggering mosaic of language, history, musicality, tragedy, joyfulness, gritty realism and soaring spirituality.

With the exception of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," all are set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where Wilson was raised. And though they don't form a single, serialized narrative, they include some recurring characters and families.

They are listed below in the chronological order of their stories. In parentheses are the dates they were published.

1904 "Gem of the Ocean"(2003). In the parlor of a modest house in Pittsburgh, the ancient matriarch Aunt Ester handles fallout from unrest at the nearby mill, as African Americans face not just the hollow promises of freedom without equality but worsening violence and oppression -- even from their own kind.

1911 "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" (1984). A mysterious itinerant, having done time on a chain gang, arrives at a boardinghouse in search of his wife and, in a larger sense, his identity.

1927 "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom"(1982). The play's title is borrowed from a hit by the great blues singer, referring to a dance from the era, but the heart of the story is tension between the brash, ambitious young trumpeter Levee and the band's tradition-minded veterans.

1936 "The Piano Lesson"(1989). A brother and sister argue over selling a piano, which -- artfully carved with images from generations of family history -- stands as a symbol of music and memory, for both good and ill.

1948 "Seven Guitars" (1995). A bluesman's funeral -- set in the suburban Pittsburgh cemetery where Wilson himself later would be buried -- opens the play somberly, but the flashbacks that follow thread the longings of the musician and those around him into what Newsweek called "a kind of jazz cantata for actors."

1957-63 "Fences" (1985). Perhaps the most celebrated play in the cycle and the most ingeniously if conventionally structured. Conflicts between a father and son, baseball as a field of dreams within a land of injustice, and the broader push toward social equality are among the themes interwoven here.

1969 "Two Trains Running" (1990). An era of widespread social and political unrest examined through the small-scale concerns of a ghetto diner results in what The New York Times' Frank Rich called "Wilson's most adventurous and honest attempt to reveal the intimate heart of history."

1977 "Jitney" (1982). Adapted from an early one-act effort, this tale of a taxi station facing the threat of urban renewal features such recurring Wilson themes as characters newly released from confinement and wounds of intergenerational conflict.

1985 "King Hedley II"(2001). Around the story of an ex-con selling stolen refrigerators in hopes of saving enough to buy a video store, Wilson weaves commentary on the decayed state of urban black America, revisits characters introduced in "Seven Guitars" and finally lays to rest Aunt Ester -- his symbol of a living and healing black history -- who dies of grief at age 366.

1997 "Radio Golf"(2005). Its final draft completed after Wilson was diagnosed with liver cancer, the close to his grand cycle deals with what he called "the failure of the black middle class" to give back to its community. By now the characters at the center of the drama are well-to-do -- a real estate developer with mayoral aspirations and a bank vice president. Yet as they seek to redevelop the blighted Hill District, the past (symbolized by Aunt Ester's decrepit but beloved house sitting in the bulldozer's path) continues to force hard choices.

-- Marty Hughley

It's a state of transition. A mixed-up point on the way to, one hopes, a new clarity. Which is fitting, in a couple of different ways.

For starters, the play Weaver is directing is "Radio Golf," the last piece in August Wilson's epic 10-play cycle about African American life in the 20th century. Set in the office of a fledgling urban redevelopment project in the 1990s, it deals with the tensions between preserving the past and pushing for progress, between the cultural values of mainstream society and its historical underclass, between group identity and assimilation. It's about the various transitions that come with decline and gentrification.

Then there is what you could consider the irony of the gentry, so to speak, addressing gentrification. Portland Playhouse was founded a year and a half ago by a trio of young whites from the East Coast -- Weaver, 34, his wife Nikki, 26, and his brother Michael, 32 -- who landed in the Albina district, once the heart of the city's black community. So as Weaver and company grapple onstage with Wilson's take on social change, offstage they navigate the ongoing transition of their adopted neighborhood.

"I'm against gentrification, yet I'm a poor artist so I move to the cheapest place I can find," Weaver says. "We bought a foreclosed house about five blocks away when we moved here, in September '08. I'm drawn to a cultural experience that is different than mine, yet me being here -- and 5,000 others like me -- alters the very differences that drew me here. It's a paradox.

"I'm aware that by trying to create a professional regional theater out of a former Baptist church in the Albina neighborhood we are actively contributing to the gentrification of our community. So we're doing a play that examines and criticizes ourselves for what we're doing."

Last year, when Portland Playhouse announced "Radio Golf" as part of its 2009-10 season, the Weavers not only had yet to secure performance rights for the play, but they also didn't know any local black actors they could cast in the show.

"I've just always loved Wilson and wanted to work on one of his plays," Weaver says. "But I never knew, as a white director, if I was allowed to."

He wasn't the only one with misgivings. When word got out that he wanted to direct "Radio Golf," he received a phone call from Kevin E. Jones, a veteran black actor most recently seen in Portland in "A Lesson From Aloes" at Third Rail Rep.

Recalls Weaver: "He told me, 'There's some uncertainty out there about this young white theater company coming to town and doing August Wilson.' So we met for coffee and he interrogated me. And we got along really well."

Wilson, who died shortly after completing "Radio Golf" in 2005, at times argued that his plays were specific to African American experience and therefore should be directed by African Americans. While Jones didn't agree with that, he wanted to hear what Weaver had to say.

Weaver says he approached the project like a detective, using research, input from dramaturg David Sietz (who grew up in Wilson's hometown, Pittsburgh, where the play is set) and the cast, and faith in the strength of the script. "My job is to make sure that everything is being said and being said clearly."

Jones came on board to play Old Joe, whose ownership claim on an abandoned house threatens to undo an ambitious redevelopment project for Pittsburgh's Hill District. Weaver also struck up a co-producing arrangement with BaseRoots Theatre Company, a newly formed group with the mission to showcase "the unique African American experience," in the process garnering Bobby Bermea, BaseRoots artistic director, and Andrea White, a core member of the group, for the cast.

"As a brand-new theater company, it's a great opportunity for us to learn how to get things done, how to use resources efficiently," Bermea says. "They've been very generous in sharing with us how they go about each step of the process. For us, it's also a great way to broaden our audience. When you say 'black theater company,' people tend to think that's an exclusive or narrow concept, whereas we see it as an expansive and inclusive concept."

There's that tension again: identity/assimilation, segregation/integration and so on. Another transition to work through.

The idea, in Weaver's view, is to work through it together.

"We've done probably four times more outreach for this show than anything we've done before," he says. "Partly that's because we're just more organized. But we've had people going to churches and getting them to put up our fliers; we've contacted high schools to let them know there are free tickets available for students; we've even had someone go door to door.

"I'll admit, it's been easier to get to know the other white families and artists who are moving into the neighborhood than it has to get to know the black families that have lived in the same houses for 30 years. But my greatest hope is that the place will be filled with both our regular theatergoing audience and the churchgoing people who've been in the neighborhood for years. And that they'll get to know each other."